


Shirk

by Good0mens



Series: certain dark things [3]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Asshole!Nicky, Comfort No Hurt, Epilogue, Fluff, Fluff and Smut, Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Implied Sexual Content, Italy, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani and Nicky | Nicolò di Genova are in Love, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Mild Smut, Nicky | Nicolò di Genova Loves Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, well not anymore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-17 16:01:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28851771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Good0mens/pseuds/Good0mens
Summary: "There’s a shadow that stretches out the space between Joe’s body and his own. Nicky is watching the Polaris of Joe’s smile, brighter than anything else, as they drink coffee that’s far too hot for the simmering heat of summer around them.Italy is just as beautiful as he remembered."An epilogue, of sorts.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: certain dark things [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2098713
Comments: 23
Kudos: 182





	Shirk

**Author's Note:**

> Hi guys, this is just a lil short and sweet fic for them, to really hit that happy ending, ya know?

The scuffed sound of boots on terra cotta cobblestone corridors; the cracked coloured paint of the splintered balcony windows; the scrape of metal chairs shaded under bright yellow umbrellas. The warm breeze billowing against the magnolia trees.

There’s a shadow that stretches out the space between Joe’s body and his own. Nicky is watching the Polaris of Joe’s smile, brighter than anything else, as they drink coffee that’s far too hot for the simmering heat of summer around them.

Italy is just as beautiful as he remembered.

* * *

Fragmented moments:

Joe’s tongue sighing poetry into Nicolo’s mouth, tracing old love letters across his shoulder blades. Hundreds of lifetimes worth of unspoken words laid out along his body like an offering.

 _Sono qui con te_ / _Per favore ho bisogno di te / Il mio sole_

The vagaries of violent thunderstorms, the kind that feels like a dark, rumbling overture. The air perfumed with peaches and the earthy smell of rain. Soaked through their clothes, sucking water off Joe’s bottom lip as they shiver and creak against the old front door.

_Ya amar / omri / ana bahebak_

Burnt orange sunsets, sinking into Joe as he sips the taste of the honey figs they got from the market from Joe’s mouth. The afternoon warmth shining through the curls framing his face, spiralling out from behind his ear. The dappled freckles on the fine bone of his ankle as Nicky traces its crescent curve.

_I’m here with you / please, I need you / my sun_

Guiding Joe’s hands through kneading the rolling dough, letting it rise and rise and rise like his pitched moans as Joe hits the right spot, curled into him like an open parenthesis. Coming apart under the twisting pressure, all that heat and salt bursting on his tongue.

_my moon / my life / I love you_

Joe walking him through an art museum, whispering, _look at how they carved such softness and delicacy out of hard marble_. Nicky, looking at Joe and at their intertwined hands and thinking the same god damned thing about the alabaster of his own skin.

Sighing each other’s names, each other’s languages, into each other’s flesh. It’s all blending together; the shadows, the words, the edges of their bodies, until it’s nearly impossible to distinguish one from the other.

* * *

Nicky still has to remind himself sometimes, that his bones are just bones, this skin is just skin, is just soft and supple flesh flushed over sinuous muscle. The sore of it is much sweeter now, though. Tempered by Joe’s touch as he wakes again in the morning, again in his arms, again, loved.

Nicky thinks about the woman in Bilin who planted a garden of flowers inside used tear-gas grenades. Some days, it feels like Joe has planted ivy in place of Nicky’s spine, climbing up his back, blooming and beautiful. Bending to the slightest suggestion of Joe’s hand.

He’s learned he feels less like a weapon when he’s wrapped in cotton sheets, with Joe at the foot of the bed, hands flying over a piece of paper.

His prone stature is stretched out across the bed, one leg kicked to the side. He’s hard, but not impatient with it; if he’s honest with himself, half of the arousal burning within him is put there by the ecstatic expectation for when Joe is finally done.

Joe is glowing gold, gold, gold and grinning, bathed in the morning light. _Just a little longer_ , he begs of Nicky.

Nicky doesn’t tell him he’d stay like that forever if Joe asked it of him, but the way Joe looks up at him over his sketchbook, eyes like sunlight bleeding through thick resin, tells Nicky he knows.

He’s soft like this, affable and filled with aching affection. Nicky runs his middle finger up and down the inside of his own forearm, trailing from the soft part of his elbow to the tip of his wrist and back again. Wonders if this is what it’s like to feel godly, to feel like more than just the sum of his broken parts, to feel like his body could be made for more than just killing.

* * *

_Do you remember the last time we were here?_

There are too many summer nights hidden underneath Nicky’s skin, when all he had was his own sweat for company, cloying, clinging to something he’s never touched. One of them, the one that Joe is reminding him of now as they walk back to their hotel, came as the result of a tussle between the two of them.

It started with an argument about a mission and ended with Nicky’s mouth and inch from Joe’s, with the significance in the silence lingering between their lips. And then Nicky had shoved him away and gone back to his own room, clutched himself in hand, fevered and desperate.

 _Little shrike_.

Joe meant to rile him up with it, and it worked; Nicky retaliates by pressing Joe up against the wall in an alleyway and kissing him breathless, fitting a knee in between Joe’s legs and swallowing the groan that tears out of him.

* * *

This is still the only prayer he needs.

Back at their hotel, Nicky runs his fingers down the naves of his navel, delighting in how Joe shivers like the exhale of a confession. Nicky presses his lips to the pulsing pulpit of his inner wrist just to feel it jump underneath his touch.

When it does, it tastes like victory. Nicky flicks his eyes up to Joe and feels as his heart stutters under Nicolo’s rapt attention, watching the exaltation of Joe’s hitched breathing.

They don’t re-enact that afternoon from all those years ago; Nicky doesn’t feel the need to rewrite history into Joe’s skin with his mouth anymore.

He intends to make new ones, instead.

There’s been too much brutality. Too much tearing, gripping, breaking. He’d take the dirt and the spit and the filth of it all if it meant he could have this, but beyond the edges of those dark, terrible things –

Joe touches a place inside of him and fills it with radiance, performing little miracles between the cradle of Nicky’s hips like some ancient apostle.

There is only this, here and now; only them. Quiet and profound. _Sacred_.

It’s all opening up under his palms, before his eyes. Joe’s thighs, his naked heart, the flower growing out of the grenade - the enduring, glorious light of it all.


End file.
